Eddie Arcaro Biography

Eddie Arcaro (1916–1997) was one of American thoroughbred
racing's legendary figures. A jockey who racked up an
impressive string of wins during his peak years in the 1940s and
1950s, the diminutive Italian-American was dubbed "the
Master" by sportswriters for the confidence he showed in the
heat of the race, as well as for the five Kentucky Derby ribbons he
collected. "Like Joe DiMaggio in baseball, Arnold Palmer and
Jack Nicklaus in golf and Joe Louis in boxing," noted Joseph
Durso of the
New York Times
, Arcaro "symbolized the exploding role of the hero in sports
in the middle decades of the century."

Born on February 19, 1916, Arcaro spent his childhood in the Cincinnati
metropolitan area, which includes the Kentucky cities of Covington and
Newport, just across the Ohio River border between the two states. His
parents, Pasquale and Josephine, were Italian immigrants and his father
held a number of jobs, including taxi driver and operator of an illegal
liquor enterprise during Prohibition. Arcaro was born prematurely, and
weighed just three pounds at birth; because of this, he was smaller than
his classmates and was rejected when he tried out for a spot on a baseball
team. His full height would reach just five-foot, two inches.

Rode First Race Illegally

By the age of 13 Arcaro had found a job as a golf caddy at the local
country club, but the bags he carried for members proved nearly as big as
he was. Intrigued by a comment one golfer made—that someone of his
stature would be ideally suited to jockey racehorses instead—Arcaro
headed to nearby Latonia Race Course (later Turfway Park) in

Florence, Kentucky, and was hired as a horse exerciser for 75 cents a day.
There was a minimum age requirement for jockeys, however, and he was still
too young to obtain a license to ride professionally, but he did run
illegally in a race on May 18, 1931, at the Bainbridge Park race track
near Cleveland, Ohio. He lost that race, as well as the next 44 events he
rode, and decided to head south for the winter racing season in Mexico.
His first win came at the Aqua Caliente track in Tijuana, on January 14,
1932, on a horse named Eagle Bird.

Arcaro turned 16 a month later, and could enter the profession
legitimately. He landed an apprentice position at the Fair Grounds
Racecourse in New Orleans, and did so well that he was hired at the famous
Calumet Farm in Lexington, Kentucky. The racehorse breeding and training
facility had been founded by a wealthy Chicagoan, William Monroe Wright,
who was heir to the Calumet Baking Powder Company fortune. Wright's
son, Warren, hired Arcaro and began pairing him with some of the
farm's best thoroughbreds. Arcaro racked up a good record at the
Washington Park track in Chicago, Jefferson Park in New Orleans, and
Narragansett Park in Rhode Island, and soon emerged as one of thoroughbred
racing's top new talents. Arcaro, noted Durso, possessed "a
street-smart sense that made him a natural in race-riding, a remarkable
combination of grace and power on a thousand-pound horse traveling 35
miles an hour for high stakes. He rode with rare technical gifts, but
mostly with an uncanny sense of mission that he seemed to share with his
horse and a killer's instinct for winning."

Arcaro rose to the pinnacle of his profession during its most
rough-and-tumble period. Thoroughbred racing was one of the most popular
spectator sports in the pre-television era, and the big-money stakes races
were avidly followed during the warm weather months of the season.
Competition on and off the track was fierce: jockeys could expect to take
home 10 percent of the winnings of that day's prize purse if their
horse won, and so they were keen to be paired with the right racer.
Illegal moves such as grabbing another horse's saddle silks to
scare it, deliberately locking legs with another rider, or even hitting
another jockey with the same whip used to urge one's own horse
forward were not uncommon. "It's an odd thing about
jockeys," Arcaro reminisced toward the end of his career in an
interview with
New York Times
journalist Joseph C. Nichols. "They're the only paid
athletes who, if you left them alone, would kill one another."

Won 1938 Derby

Arcaro entered his first Kentucky Derby race in 1935, riding a horse named
Nellie Flag. The race, held at the Churchill Downs track in Louisville,
was one of the three Triple Crown events in U.S. thoroughbred horse
racing, along with the Preakness Stakes at Baltimore's Pimlico Race
Course and the Belmont Stakes at Belmont Park in Elmont, New York. It took
another three years before Arcaro won his first Derby, riding the 1938
winner Lawrin to national acclaim. The press called him "Steady
Eddie" for his habit of remaining as still as a statue during the
race, but his signature move was switching the whip between his right and
left hands as he urged the horse forward.

In 1941 Arcaro rode another horse to victory at Churchill Downs on Derby
Day, this one called Whirlaway. "A sensational chestnut
thoroughbred colt with a long tail," noted
Sports Illustrated
writer Jim Bolus, Whirlaway had a rather notorious reputation prior to
that win for being as temperamental as he was strong. When Arcaro was
asked to ride him, he was wary. "I had seen too many good riders
that couldn't handle him," he told Bolus. "I
didn't know why they thought I could. They were having a lot of
trouble with him. He would bolt." Calumet Farms trainer Ben Jones
(1882–1961), as famous in his day as Arcaro, noticed that that
Whirlaway sometimes strayed off course, and decided to put a blinker over
just one eye. Arcaro and Whirlaway won the 1941 Kentucky Derby with a
record time of two minutes, one second. That spring, the duo went on to
win both the Preakness and the Belmont Stakes, earning them
racing's highly coveted and rarely achieved Triple Crown title.

Arcaro and Jones teamed up several times to make Calumet Farm horses
stakes winners, and the jockey was courted by other owners and trainers
during these peak years of his career. In 1942 his career almost came to
an end after trouble at the Aqueduct track in Queens, New York. He and a
rival jockey, Vincent Nodarse, had several deliberate and near-deadly
encounters during a race, and Arcaro finally managed to knock Nodarse off
his horse. When questioned by race officials, he freely admitted,
"I was trying to kill the S.O.B.," according to
People
. The incident
resulted in an indefinite suspension by racing authorities, but his new
patron, Helen Hay Whitney, intervened to have the ban lifted after a year.

Won Triple Crown Title Again

In 1945 Arcaro won his third Kentucky Derby, this time on Hoop Jr. He won
again three years later on Citation, another famous horse of the era, and
that day in May of 1948 became the first of a long winning streak for the
pair: Arcaro rode Citation to 16 consecutive first-place finishes,
including the Preakness and the Belmont, which gave him his second Triple
Crown title. With that he became the first jockey ever to win the Crown
more than once, a feat that has remained his alone well into the
twenty-first century. In 1952 Arcaro won his fifth Kentucky Derby race on
another Jones-trained mount, Hill Gail. Only one other rider, Bill Hartack
(born 1932), has ever won the Kentucky Derby five times or more. Arcaro
also won the Preakness Stakes six times, a record for that course, and
tied with another jockey for six wins for the Belmont Park Triple Crown
contest.

Arcaro was immensely famous at the peak of his career. Thoroughbred racing
ranked with baseball and boxing as one of the most widely followed sports
in America, in an era when football, basketball, and hockey had yet to
find their coast-to-coast fan bases. His 1951 autobiography was titled
I Ride to Win!
, and he continued to achieve that goal for the rest of the decade. He was
inducted into the Racing Hall of Fame in 1958, but was thrown from his
horse during the Belmont Stakes a year later; knocked unconscious, he
nearly drowned in a puddle of water before his rescuers arrived. Though
Arcaro was seriously injured, he claimed that the helmet he
wore—newly introduced in the sport—had saved his life.

Arcaro's last race came on November 18, 1961, and the following
April, at the age of 46, he announced his formal retirement from the
sport. Three decades of spills and persistent bursitis in one arm forced
him to quit, but he had indeed hesitated, he admitted. "I like
being a celebrity. I'm being honest…. When I retire
I'll be just another little man," Nichols quoted him as
saying. Arcaro finished with an impressive career record: he entered
24,092 races, won 4,779 of them, finished second in another 3,807
contests, and racked up 554 victories in the all-important stakes races.
For several years during the 1940s and 1950s, he was the highest-paid
jockey in U.S. thoroughbred racing. Earnings are calculated on the betting
payouts for a horse, and winning riders received a 10 percent cut. His
career total was over $30 million, much of which he invested in the oil
business, a chain of drive-in restaurants, and even saddlery
manufacturers. He retired to Florida, where he played golf and served as a
broadcast analyst for Triple Crown races for a number of years. Widowed in
1988 when Ruth, his wife of 51 years, passed away, he remarried and spent
the remainder of his years in the Miami area. He died of liver cancer on
November 14, 1997, at the age of 81. Survivors included his wife, Vera,
and children Robert and Carolyn.

Despite the fiercely competitive atmosphere of thoroughbred racing, Arcaro
served as a mentor to a younger generation of jockeys. Earlier, in the
1940s, he was one of the co-founders of the Jockeys Guild, which sought to
secure disability assistance for injured riders and guard the profession
against abuses such as race fixing. Arcaro was president of the Guild from
1949 until 1961. Years later, he philosophized about the tricky
combination of jockey, animal, and oval track in a sport in which many
thousands of dollars could be wagered on a single two-minute event.
"Race riding is as much physical exertion as you want to put into
it,"
Investor's Business Daily
journalist Michael Rich-man quoted him as saying. "You develop
strong back and shoulder muscles by pushing with the horse on every
stride, by showing him you're the boss and making him keep his mind
on the job."

Periodicals

Cincinnati Post
(Cincinnati, OH), May 1, 2006.

Investor's Business Daily
, February 1, 2002.

Kentucky Post
, March 26, 1997.

New York Post
, June 9, 1952; September 26, 1958.

New York Times
, May 2, 1948; April 4, 1962; November 15, 1997.

People
, December 1, 1997.

Sporting News
, November 24, 1997.

Sports Illustrated
, November 4, 1991; November 24, 1997.

User Contributions:

Eddie Arcaro was a favored patron (who couldn't pay for a drink) at Toots Shor's in NYC. Arcaro was a proponent of a theory that of all athletes the top were jockeys. His reasoning was that a jockey must have the back, arm, and shoulder strength to control a thousand pound animal, must have the reflexes to drive that animal through tiny openings that close within fractions of seconds, and must have the finger strength to guide his horse to front of the pack at presisely the right time...

So, strength, courage, reflexes, delicacy, intelligence were requirements for winning jockeys and putthem at the top of the heap.

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